Anyone who wants to know how much our society values vulnerable children need only take note of two hearings held in the same city, Madison, on the same day, February 4th, to get an answer: nowhere near as much as we should.
Beginning at 10 a.m., a joint hearing by the two legislative committees that address issues affecting children and families heard testimony from a variety of perspectives on “The State of Wisconsin’s Families and Children in an Economic Crisis.”
Parish signing campaigns against the proposed Freedom of Choice Act are ongoing in our diocese. These campaigns also are allowing the people of the Diocese of Madison to voice their concerns related to second-trimester abortions performed at the Madison Surgery Center.
Finding the following comments from Mr. Joseph Collison, director of the pro-life office for the Diocese of Norwich, Conn., to be helpful, I want to share them with you by means of this column because the numbers are frightening.
Mr. Collison states that every fourth baby conceived in the United States is deliberately destroyed in our nation’s busy abortion businesses. Every day 3,500 developing babies are killed. Almost 1.5 million are killed every year. Our nation has the highest abortion rate in the Western world, and half of the American mothers seeking abortions have already aborted at least one child before.
Fr. Jim Murphy, in his letter in the December 25 edition of the Catholic Herald, argues that Catholics ought not participate in the U.S. military at this time because that participation “would likely involve immoral activity.”
He cites papal and other ecclesiastical opinions that our invasion of Iraq was not moral, conditions at the Abu Ghraib prison, and the holding of people at the Guantanamo Naval Base, the rendition program, the condition of veterans returning from the theater of combat, the existence of nuclear weapons, and the shear size of annual military spending.
Editor’s note: This commentary was written for the bulletin of the Cathedral Parish in Madison for the weekend of January 24 and 25.
What a great feast it is that we celebrate today! Saul, the most ardent persecutor of the Faith, becomes St. Paul, its greatest proponent. That is really something to celebrate . . . for a number of reasons.
For one thing, this feast is a tremendous sign of hope for the Church as she travels through history. In this world, the Church has enemies. But we should look at each of them with the awareness that here may be the next Saul: the greatest enemy can become the greatest ally.
I am writing to encourage everyone who reads this newspaper to either make a phone call or write a letter to the UW Hospital System. I have put all of their contact information at the end of this article.
Various medical conditions can affect a woman’s ability to carry a pregnancy and, at times, even threaten her and her child’s life.
Some of these conditions include pulmonary hypertension, Marfan’s syndrome, and certain congenital problems with the aorta. When a doctor informs a woman that she cannot become pregnant in the future without serious consequences to herself and her baby, having her tubes tied might seem to be the most appropriate response. Some would further argue that since the sterilization would be for “medical reasons,” it would be an “indirect sterilization” and therefore morally acceptable.
To know, love, and serve him in this life and to be happy with him forever in the next is why God made us. Family provides the environment in which knowing, loving, and serving God is made real.
As a matter of fact, the root meaning of the word family is servant. It is in the family where we are to learn how to be a servant. Our success has a direct relationship to finding meaning and purpose in life, to finding peace and happiness.
The 2009 legislative session that begins this month will be different from recent sessions in one big way. For the first time since 1994 Democrats, and not Republicans, will control the State Assembly.
But in other significant ways, the session will be very similar to 2007. And that means in all likelihood, major policy changes will reflect a moderate, pragmatic tone.
Ad majorem Dei gloriam — It was the first Latin phrase that I committed to memory. The cross and the four letters A.M.D.G. were mandatory on all homework assignments for Sister Dolorosa’s eighth grade class.
At my home parish, eighth grade meant not only graduation, but Confirmation, and Confirmation meant knowing who you were, why you were created, and what God wanted you to do. In eighth grade it was difficult enough to discern right from wrong, much less discern the will of God in your life. How do you hear God through the voices of friends, raging hormones, new and strange emotions, and trying to retain the pleasures of childhood while balancing on the edge of an adult world?
Did you weep that night? November 4, 2008, was one of those times when every senior citizen in this country had to whisper, “Thank you, Lord, for letting me live to see this day when an African American has been elected president of the United States, the leader of the free world.”
Regardless of how one may have voted in this election, no one who had lived through witnessing President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 sign an order that would allow people of any color, race, or creed the right to vote, or who could recall the race riots and the separate drinking fountains and bus seats of the ’50s could possibly be unmoved by this drama.
